My skull liking is a known fact on this blog. Recently a friend gave me a box of three. They are large and unlike anything I have seen or collected. They have been in the garage soaking in Hydrogen Peroxide. The base of this assemblage is the first one I took out, it must be a larger animal like a goat and the skull is creepily intact. I was playing around with the larger skull and added components. The close up of the round face will make a nice black and white drawing, I think. The entire thing would make a great if complex drawing or painting.

My sister was such a cute kid. This is another drawing from a family photograph. I am in the background and Jane is hamming it up for the camera in the foreground. I did the drawing yesterday to try and get myself away from all the food in the house. I think the more I draw the better the drawings, duh. Day off today so I’m going to draw something else.

Man, I have a lot of artwork. It’s stacked up everywhere in the house. Today while cleaning baseboard moldings in the dining room and living room, I found this little landscape done by yours truly quite a while ago. It fits in with the landscapes of other artists I’ve been posting and is autumnal in color. I’m not sure of the date or if it is oil or acrylic. Happy Thanksgiving!

I fell in love with this painting in a Provincetown gallery about twenty five years ago. When we left P’Town I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I called the gallery and bought it. This painting is one of my favorites. To me it has all the elements of a great painting: color, texture, narrative. I love the houses peeking out of the crazy landscape on the left hand side. The dark blue sky finishes it as the eye moves upward. Brenda Horowitz studied with Hans Hofmann and I guess you’d consider her an American expressionist.

Today I spent the day doing the two windows at the store. It was going to be two snow globes. I did them in glass paint (kind of hard to see in the picture) in blue, hologram glitter and then white painted over. For some reason the store manager took a dislike to my work and before I knew it she had windexed my work and squeegeed it off! Then she took the flat white paint and proceeded to do her version. If she is reading this, sorry, honey, but it sucked. I wasn’t even finished with it! I don’t know whether to be amused or pissed but I’m leaning on the pissed side. Oh well, just another day in the life.

The assignment for my journal was to go outside and draw, again using the same subject in different media. In 1989 I was in Arizona visiting my parents. So I drew what was in their yard (of stones, not grass)–which was cactus. In 2014, it’s autumn in New York, so what do I see in the natural world when I go out? Lots and lots of leaves.

I think the pencil drawings both turned out OK, although I wrote “too timid” on my page in 1989. As I’ve noted before, my drawing style has not really changed over the years.

I was not an experienced watercolorist in 1989 either, and it shows. But the abstraction of the cactus is kind of interesting. I’ve been painting a lot more recently, plus I’m sure I just used one of those little paint boxes in 1989 instead of dyes or tubes, so the leaves are a lot more successful. Still abstracted, though.

I must have gotten tired by the time I got to the colored pencil cactus drawing in 1989. The background is bizarre for one. Although the cactus itself is not bad; I should have stopped there.

I did two versions of leaves, and this is the second, which I like better because it’s bolder. Also I did the first one on the same day as the black pencil and watercolor versions and I definitely was tired. I’m liking what I can do with colored pencils–these are different than the “in the news” drawings I’ve been doing, and I think I’ll explore some more with this layering of colors.

I have various configurations of family visiting for the next 10 days, so…Happy Thanksgiving, I’ll be back in December.

The branch of the New York Public Library that I use most often is the Morningside Heights location. They often have art exhibits, and the current one is a lot of fun.

The Trinidadian artist Guy Beckles calls his work Kinetic Art. Kinetic: from the Greek kinetikos, to move: “characterized by movement”. His animated sculptures certainly captivated library patrons from strollers well into adulthood as I was photographing them this week. They initiated conversations between parents/caretakers and children, and between the children themselves. Mr. Beckles says on his website that he hopes to draw people in so that they interact with his art, to both inspire ideas into action and produce smiles. It seems to be working.

Not all the sculptures fared equally well in my photos, but you can see them in motion by visiting the library, or on Mr. Beckles’ website in videos. He also provides poetic commentary on individual works, which have great titles too.

And you can take classes with the artist: learn how to translate your own ideas into your own Kinetic Art!

This recently ubiquitous ad with it’s equally ubiquitous i-product was fertile ground to explore the desirability to consumers of i-products in general…not a u-phone or u-thinking, or even a wii-pad or wii-shares. Once again, what we buy is only a reflection of who we are.

Outbreak is a Poor
Researcher: Mistake, Message,
and Election

Illustrated Poetry recently had a post on computer-generated surrealist poetry (https://wordpress.com/read/post/id/67692698/832/). I took headline words from the front section of the NY Times where the ad appeared and plugged them into Poem Generator’s given structure: amazing. I got lots of great lines. I liked particularly the one above.

You can also create your own structure, so I took a classic haiku from Basho to see what would happen with that. Poem Generator must have been channeling Congress! Or at least Fox News.

All lemurs are native to Madagascar, an island off Africa that is one of the highest priority conservation areas on Earth. It’s unique ecology is threatened by habitat destruction, political instability, and climate change. Madagascar has already lost 90% of its natural vegetation due to logging and the clearing of land for human use. Lemurs are threatened not only by habitat destruction and isolation, but by hunting.

Ring-tailed lemurs are abundant in zoos throughout the world, but the population in the wild, along with that of all lemurs, continues to decline.